She was in Woodside visiting her parents when she saw a sign taped to the window of Doherty’s: “Big Mike Tumulty vs. Pete McNeese in a footrace. Friday, July 21, 7:00.”
She knew Pete, and she’d never much liked him. He was tall and skinny, and he always seemed to speak a little louder than came naturally, as if he were imitating another man’s voice.
“What’s this about a race?” she asked her father as she walked into the kitchen. He was sitting sideways at the table with a cup of tea, looking out the window. He wore a new white undershirt and slippers.
“He was running his mouth off about how fleet of foot he was.”
“You’re almost sixty years old.”
“So what?”
“Pete is barely thirty.” Her father put the kettle back on.
“So he’s half my age,” her father said. “He’s also half the man.”
She thought the whole thing ridiculous, but on the race’s appointed day, she couldn’t help dropping by Doherty’s on the way home from work. The bar was fuller than usual, almost visibly crackling with static energy, as if a prizefight was about to take place instead of an absurd pissing contest. Happy shouts rose over the din, and everywhere she looked, men huddled and clapped their palms to the backs of each other’s necks. Someone asked her father how he planned to beat Pete. “I’ll blind him with the tobacco juice,” he said through a cheekful of chaw, to a round of hearty laughter. Guys were taking final book. “Two dollars on Big Mike,” she heard one say proudly, and she imagined that if all the money her father’s adherents were willing to lose to support him were piled on the bar, it would be enough to buy the establishment from the owners, or do something worthwhile.
The course was set: they would start in the bar, at the back, run out to the sidewalk, circle the block once, and return to the bar. It wouldn’t be easy to watch. Pete and his horse-long legs would come around the corner upright and easy, and her father would follow with his cheeks puffed, his face carmine red, his legs churning. Everyone gathered would watch an era end.
“Give me a glass of Irish whiskey,” her father said, gently rapping his knuckles on the bar. “I’m warming up.” He took his shirt off, then his undershirt. He resembled a bare-knuckled fighter. Pete tried to smirk, but he looked unnerved. Her father put his foot up on a stool. There were packs of muscle shifting under his skin, and when he leaned over to tie his shoe, his back looked broad enough to play cards on.
“Jimmy,” he called out with mock sharpness. “Get those kids out of the street. I don’t want to run any of them down.”
Guys laughed, exchanged looks. Her father and Pete toed a line in the back of the bar. The bartender counted down from three and they headed through a crowded gauntlet on either side, reaching the door at the same time. Her father shifted his massive body laterally like a darting bull and crushed Pete in the doorframe. They never made it outside. Pete staggered, out of breath before he’d even begun.
“They broke at the gate,” her father said as he returned to his stool, heat radiating visibly off his naked skin, a slight glower to him, a hint of violence in his eyes, the pride of a clan chieftain in his heavy step. She watched his friends retrieve their money and felt their eyes on her long, lean body, which her work suit clung to in the summer evening heat. They regarded her appreciatively, with a slightly wistful longing. She was the chieftain’s daughter, and she’d married outside the clan.
They hadn’t won anything, but they hadn’t lost anything either—neither money nor their idea of Big Mike. Her father had played Pete’s game, but by his own rules. It was a Solomonic solution, and she thought sadly of the difference he would have made with his gift for inspiring men if he’d been born into another life.
10
Ed was an expert on the brain. His subspecialty within the field of neuroscience was psychopharmacology, specifically the effects of psychotropic drugs on neural functioning. While doing his dissertation research, he ran an experiment in the aquaria of the Department of Animal Behavior at the American Museum of Natural History, studying the relationship between the neurotransmitter norepinephrine and learning in the black-chinned West African mouthbrooder fish, whose female laid eggs and whose male spat sperm at them and gathered them, then heated them under its tongue. Ed housed them individually in small aquaria in a greenhouse whose temperature was maintained at 26°C, and performed experimental tests in a separate room at the same temperature, injecting them with drugs that either enhanced or depressed action. The fish saw a red light, and if they didn’t jump over a barrier in five seconds, they received a shock. He was testing the effects of drugs on an organism’s ability to augment its decision-making abilities—in short, to learn.
The subject of learning fascinated him. He told Eileen it was because it had happened almost by accident in his own life. “If I hadn’t run into that chemist at Kohnstamm’s,” he said, “I don’t know what would have become of me. I think about that narrow escape.”
He experimented on the fish faithfully six days a week for almost a year, going in even when it was supremely inconvenient to do so, missing family functions and dinners with friends, leaning on colleagues for favors when she put her foot down and demanded a sliver of his time. He never slept enough, he seldom ate enough, and his back always hurt because he sat too long at his desk, but the way the work was coming together gave him so much energy that he glowed as he neared the end, so much so that she went shopping without him and put a coffee table, two couches, a pair of end tables, and some lamps on the American Express, thinking he’d be too happy to complain. Still, she was so nervous about the cost that a few weeks later, on the Saturday when the furniture was supposed to be delivered, she still hadn’t told him it was coming. She was relieved when he left early for his lab to gather data, and after the men delivered the pieces and hauled the old couch to the backyard until the Monday pickup, she sat on one of the couches, fretting over what she’d say. When the front door finally opened, she leapt to her feet, ready to spar, but Ed stepped in from the vestibule wearing that tranquil expression he wore when he was deep in his work, that made it look as if he’d just come from meditating. As he took in the room, she waited to see his face fall and readied to say she’d send it all back, but all he did was sit on the couch and say how nice and firm the pillows were compared to the lumpy ones they’d been living with. She’d never even thought he’d registered the lumps.
He was about two weeks shy of having gathered all the data he needed when the heating plant broke down and the aquaria froze, killing his specimens.
He didn’t smash equipment or hurl insults at the plant manager. He didn’t come home and make life miserable for her. He ate a quiet dinner and lay on the floor in the living room, between the glass-topped coffee table and one of the couches. She lay on the other couch reading to keep him company. She understood he didn’t want a pep talk. When it was time to turn in, she leaned over him and saw in his eyes not sadness but extreme fatigue. She knew enough not to tell him everything would be fine. She gave him a kiss on the lips, told him to come in soon, and shut the light off. He remained behind in the silent dark. He came to bed very late, and the next day he began again from the beginning, with new fish, because he needed a full set of data.
When he finished a year later, he had worked on the fish for so long that the species’ scientific name had changed twice, from Tilapia heudelotii macrocephala to Tilapia melanotheron to Sarotherodon melanotheron melanotheron.
“You never get anywhere worthwhile taking shortcuts,” he said when she asked how he’d gotten through that difficult time. She couldn’t have agreed more. Not taking shortcuts—not settling for someone inferior—was the only reason she’d been free to marry him.
? ? ?
They started going out again. Ed got them a membership at the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra. Once, when they were heading to the symphony, he picked a wounded fledgling off the sidewalk and carried it in his handkerchief for a few blocks, until he bowed to her protestations and deposited it in a planter. He gave her the silent treatment until they got home. When she was shutting off the light she said, “Good night, St. Francis of Assisi,” and he laughed despite himself and they made love and fell asleep.